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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

First Impressions - Post Marked: Piper's Reach

It's a new month and that means First Impressions. Today we have something different, an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of documents - like letters or diary entries, for example) written by a team of authors (Adam Byatt & Jodi Cleghorn ) who live 12 hours away from one another. This novel was previously published as a web serial at Post Marked: Piper's Reach. My comments will be in purple and you can see what Dianne Salerni had to say over at her blog, In High Spirits.

Friday 6th
January, 2012

Dear Jude,

Please excuse the
crappy yellow legal pad. Had I waited to find fancy

stationery, I
might never have sat down to write. Your parents are

still listed at
Blecker Street, so I’m sending the letter there and

hopefully they’ll
pass it on to you. This feels a little formal to me but I'm saying this from an "American" perspective...

Why don’t I just
ring your Dad, see if you’re alive and well, and get

your phone number
or an email address? I can’t. I need to write and do

it old school with
pen and paper. Think about each word before I put

it down (and swear
because my hand is already aching from writing more

than I have in a
decade). To send an email would be like warping the

fabric of space
and time. But then again, writing a letter to you

after so long,
feels a little like that anyway. At this point, I'm intrigued.First we have the name Jude which could be male or female, which leaves us guessing. Then we have this long gap since these two people have seen each other. Why? What's happened in those intervening years and, more importantly, why is this person writing to Jude now? What's prompted this?

When we sat at The
Point watching the sun come up on 1992 I believed

in an eternity of
New Year’s Eves with you, my best friend, by my

side. I had no
idea that it would be our last.

Just so you know,
it hasn’t taken me twenty years to forgive you for

not showing up at
my farewell party. Or at the bus the next day. You

did me a favour. Had
you come to say good-bye, I don’t think I would

have had the
courage to go and leave you behind. Oh wow. So what happened that Jude didn't show?

I quit my job at
the end of last year. Decided it was time for a sea

change, to
reassess what’s important in life. Important to me. I’ve

bought an old weatherboard
cottage just up the coast from Coffs

Harbour. It’s not
Piper’s Reach (I couldn’t go back there) (Ooh, why not?!)
but I’m near the ocean
again. I can lie awake at night and hear the crash
of the waves, smell
the salt and seaweed.

Finding the
shoebox with your letters and other teenage stuff (I still

have the chewie
wrapper you gave me the first day we met) it felt like

no time had
passed. But at the same time, like I’ve lived several

lives since then.
Guess I have in a way.

Reading your old
letters there were events I remembered and others I’d

forgotten – like
the first thing I ever said to you was I didn’t kiss

boys so you
thought I was a lesbian until I pashed Bart Lehmann at the

Year 10 social. I assume 'pashed' is akin to snogged?

This is an interesting beginning. I don't think I've ever read an adult epistolary novel and I'm curious to see where this goes. This first page/first letter tells me quite a bit. Like the fact that Jude and whoever is writing the letter were probably once lovers, that they were close but that for some reason Jude didn't come to see our narrator off, and that Piper's Reach has some shared meaning for them. What's great about this first page is that it sets up lots of questions about the past between these two people but also suggests a question about the future. Why is the narrator writing to Jude now, twenty years later?I want to know what happens next!What did you think? Do have any suggestions on how to make this first page better?

"Pashed" is an Australian colloquialism for kissing. It was used in the early 1990s when Jodi and I were in high school, the same time Ella-Louise and Jude were in high school.

Then there's "pash rash" which is what you get when kissing a boy with a stubbled face.

It was a lot of fun to hand write each letter, send it through the post and wait for the sound of the postie. After we read it, we deconstructed it over skype or facebook. We had a "No Spoiler" policy, which meant the narrative developed organically.

If readers are interested, Jude's corresponding letter answers some of the questions raised by Ella-Louise's opening letter but it also raises more questions than it answers. If people are interested Jude has a different 'voice' to Ella-Louise, with his own perspective on their life.

Last year, we wrote a Christmas Special. It gives an insight into one night in the life of Ella-Louise and Jude in 1991. It encapsulates their relationship as developed and reflected in their letters in the present. If people are interested, they can read it here: http://postmarkedpipersreach.wordpress.com/christmas-special/

I love all of the little hooks and mysteries you managed to get in just one short letter. I was worried you were going to answer all of my questions too fast, but you didn't - you held back and gave me a taste of an answer and then more questions, which is perfect. Great start :)

There's no middle ground with epistolary writing. It either hits or misses. This one hits! I liked the rater formal British opening--I know a Brit who refuses to send emails so could understand why the written form -- and Jude so added to the mystery of what was ahead. Great job!

It's definitely an interesting premise. I guess though, I feel like it feels a little forced to have it all in a letter, just because BACKSTORY... if they were both there... I mean I think the story sounds good, but there would have to be very little of THAT going forward. (I say this as a person who was a SERIOUS pen pal for years).

Hart - I'm interested to know if it feels forced in just this letter or the idea of an entire novel told through letters?

Backstory is an interesting point to tackle. We've done it throughout the opening of the series/novel as a point of shared contact after a very long time of not having each other in their lives. While they both might have been 'there' - the shared experience is often different and as the letter progress the two of them get to deconstruct these memories/events to find out what was really going on for each of them at the time. It is both a salve and a safety blanket. A chance to finally come clean. To purge even.

Also one of the characters is stuck in the past and unable to move on (in a way) so backstory plays multiple roles other than just allowing the reader to see into the past of these two characters.

I'm completely hooked. I love epistolary novels. Most of the ones around are in diary form, but Lady Susan by Jane Austen is in letters. If anyone is interested, there is a list on Goodreads:http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/304.Epistolary_Fiction

I like the idea of a novel of letters. Even more, I love how you both wrote letters to make it evolve organically. There could be a danger of having letters feel like backstory since it's all told in reflection, but you strike a nice balance here.

WEST OF PARADISE

In which Jack and Katherine find out that traveling to the past - 1881 to be exact - isn't nearly as much fun as they thought it would be...

first impressions

I have teamed up with Dianne Salerni and Krystalyn Drown to critique the first page of your unpublished manuscript on the first Monday of every month. If you're interested, please email Me or Dianne. We promise to be nice :)

Please, write 'first impressions' in the subject line, and paste your submission into the body of the email - no attachments. We'll also happily link to your blog, website, what have you, and would love a pic, either of you or something appropriate to your work, and that you have the rights to. Thank-you! Critiques help all of us.

FAQs

1. A page is about 350-400 words2. Prologue or first chapter? Send what you would query an agent or editor with.3. Will we rip your work apart? Absolutely not. We do our best to be kind and helpful.

you:

me:

Marcy S. Hatch, author of West of Paradise (think Tombstone meets Romancing the Stone) from WiDo publishing. I live in Midcoast Maine. I can walk downtown to the Damariscotta River and the award winning Maine Coast Bookshop, which has a webcam on its roof and a cafe on the sidewalk. If you want to see what my town looks like from up there, double click on the door below and you'll get a bird's eye view.

If you are a new author I would be happy to post a pic/link of your upcoming novel and interview you if you're interested. Don't be shy! Click on contact :)